James Doelman: "The Parodic Epitaph"

James Doelman

Brescia University College

University of Western Ontario

“A Libell, for an Epitaph”: The Parodic Epitaph in the Early Stuart Period

I

1> The epitaph is among the most frequently practised, but also least discussed, Renaissance literary forms. Its directness, brevity and simplicity have led to this widespread critical gap, one that has been only partially filled by Joshua Scodel’s The English Poetic Epitaph, a valuable survey of the function and dynamics of the form over a number of centuries.[1] However, the satiric sub-genre of the parodic epitaph has been even less considered.[2] Its function is markedly different from the parent genre: it offers a counter to the official version that praised the deceased, suggesting implicitly its fictionality, its priorizing of form over reality.[3] Because of their widespread oral and manuscript circulation many of these have survived, ironically triumphing over the seemingly more permanent official epitaphs engraved in stone. Mock epitaphs of political figures in the early Stuart age are of particular significance, as they contributed to sometimes violent political and factional struggles. While scholars such as Alastair Bellany and Pauline Croft have considered individual instances of such poems,[4] hitherto lacking has been a study that considers them within the theory and conventions of the epitaph as a form in the period.

2> Unlike literal epitaphs, these parodic epitaphs never aspired to brazen permanence; instead their immortality was based upon multiplication of copies, encouraged by brevity and memorability. Margaret Rose’s discussion of parody generally assumes that the approach derives its comic effect from some “incongruity between the original and its parody”,[5] and is generally “the comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material”.[6] However, most parodic epitaphs did not respond to official original ones, as the public display of the latter was usually delayed by the long period required for the building of the tomb. Instead, they rewrote the conventions and norms that were widely associated with the genre, in this way offering a pre-emptive parody of what might eventually be inscribed upon the tomb. Thus, this sub-genre functioned significantly differently than most parodies, and, in fact, some official epitaphs and elegies respond to the satiric parodies that preceded them, a phenomenon that will be explored in the final section of this paper.

3> The second type of satiric mock epitaph I consider functions differently, in that its target is not the deceased, but those in positions of power, who might control any official inscribed epitaph. This type functions by once again anticipating the official epitaph (rather than responding to its actual content), but goes beyond it in telling the whole truth. The two types of parodic epitaph then share this quality: that they defy the levelling effect of the epitaph genre, which treats all deceased with the same limited terms of conventional praise.[7]

II

4> Parodic epitaphs use the same rhetorical techniques that were widespread in the parent form, but the content is shifted from eulogistic praise to sharp rebuke and blame. Implicit is that this particular figure does not deserve the usual rhetoric or epitaphic praise. The conventional opening, “Here lies”, the direct addressing of the passer-by, the cataloguing of qualities, the cause or situation of death, the tension between the fate of the body and soul—all these are adopted by the parodic epitaph. Their manipulation can best be considered in a few specific examples written on the death of powerful figures in the early Stuart period.

5> When Robert Cecil died in 1612, after two decades of ever-increasing political power, there was the usual immediate composition and publication of official elegies.[8] However, more remarkable and discussed was the outpouring of mock epitaphs and other forms of libellous abuse.[9] Such was the public expectation of libellous epitaphs that John Donne (playfully I believe) speculated that friends of Cecil had circulated “tasteless and flat” ones to draw attention away from those more polished ones that “would take deep root”: “For when the noise is risen that libels are abroad, men’s curiosity must be served with something, and it is better for the honour of the person traduced that some blunt, downright railings be vented, of which everybody is soon weary, than other pieces which entertain us long with a delight and love to the things themselves.”[10] Regrettably, Donne gives no indication of which libels he had heard.

6> However, from surviving manuscript evidence, it would seem the most popular was that which in mock pastoral form treated Cecil as “Hobbinoll”:

“Heere lies Hobbinoll our Shepheard while ere
Who once a yeere duely our fleeces did sheere,
To please us his curre he chaynde to a clogg
And was himselfe after both Shepheard and dogg
For oblation to Pan his order was thus
Himselfe gave a trifle and sacrifizde us
And so with his wysedome this provident Swayne
Kept himselfe on the mountayne and us on the playne
Where many a fine Hornepipe he tund’e to his Phillis
And swetely sunge walsingham to Amarillis
Till Atropos payde him, a pox on the drabbe
In spight of the tarbox, he died of the scabbe.”[11]

7> Like panegyric epitaphs, this sums up the life, but here a life of greed and misuse of power, and its concluding on the cause of death is also a common feature. Serious epitaphs frequently focussed upon the corpse that the grave contained, offering some variant on the concept that “the bones lie here, the soul is in heaven.” In the mock epitaphs on Cecil this focus is maintained on the body, but not as a mere empty shell which has been surpassed. Instead the body’s corruption is presented as a marker of the corruption of Cecil’s body during his life, it being widely bruited that he had died of the pox. Such is the case in both “Heere lyes Hobbinol”, and “heere lyes enterred lyttle robyn ye woorthie”[12], a much rarer parodic epitaph on Cecil. This latter poem also includes a facetious portrayal of his soul’s arrival not in heaven, but hell.

8> Francis Osborne noted that it was “the fashion of the Poets all my days, to sum up great mens Vertues or Vices upon their Graves” :[13] often this took the form of a listing of the attributes of the deceased. Many of the mock epitaphs on the death of Buckingham in 1628 suggest that the grave holds not the Duke, but his attributes, places or manifold oppressions of the nation. Like the panegyric epitaph, this could be concluded with the conceit that this small tomb held all these things: “All this lies underneath this stone/And yet (alas) heere lyes but one.”[14] The basic structure of these mock epitaphs was maintained in circulation, but the listed attributes varied, and it is quite possible that such poems slowly accumulated their catalogues of vices.

9> Often, the circumstances of death provided the point of the poem. Typical was the epigram on the earl of Dorset, who in 1608 died in the midst of a case at Whitehall:

“Discourteous Death that wouldst not once confer,
Or daign to parly with our Treasurer:
Had he been Thee, or of thy fatal Tribe,
He would have spar’d a life to gain a bribe.”[15]

10> The exceptional situation of his death allowed for a witty comment that summed up the whole of his public life. This particular example is also very nicely polished, all leading to the balanced phrases of the last line, and the final sharp point on the rhyme word “bribe”.

11> A satiric epitaph did not always wait for the actual death of its subject: composing such epitaphs on one’s friends seems to have been a common exercise of wit in the literary circles at the Inns of Court. It might also be put to more public purpose, as in these widely circulating lines on Lady Anne Lake in 1619:

“Heere lyes the breife of badnes vices nurse
The badge of Usurie the Clergies curse.
The shame of weomen kind, tradsmens decay
The patronesse of pride, Extortions high way
The forge of slaunder, and each wild action
ffrend to romes whore, Spy to the Spanish faction
A bitch of court, a common slincking snake
Worse then all these, Heere lyes the Ladie Lake.”[16]

12> Written about a living figure, a parodic epitaph may be a reminder of the legacy that the subject might face on her actual death. Like the epitaphs on Buckingham, this is a catalogue of the vices of its subject, only finally named in the concluding couplet, which also suggests that her name and reputation already surpass all the listed vicious roles.

III

13> The most widely circulating parodic epitaphs were pejorative, and only a short list of exceptional figures enjoyed widespread celebratory epitaphs: Sir Philip Sidney, Essex, Prince Henry and Ralegh. Many of these criticize those who survive, either for their neglect of the dead, or their failure to match his accomplishments. All these are parodic in that they are not inscribed on the tomb, and often proudly see themselves as uninscribable because of their outspokenness (or the lack of any proper tomb to mark). Thus, a prose epitaph on the Earl of Essex addresses the reader: “Here lyes Robert Earle of Essex, who being naturally good was by the iniquity of the Times compeld to die Justly, Yow expected an Epitaph and instead hereof you have a Ridle.”[17] The death, the tomb, and the very absence of a traditional epitaph of praise stand as an indictment of the age. The contrasting of the funerary responses to the death of a number of important figures was also widespread. The lavish tomb of Sir Christopher Hatton (d. 1591) thus became the focal point of mocking epitaphs (and anti-epitaphs), of which Thomas Bastard’s was the best-known:

“Sir Francis and sir Philip, have no Toombe,
Worthy of all the honour that may be.
And yet they lye not so for want of roome,
Or want of love in their posteritie.
Who would from living hearts vntombe such ones,
To bury under a fewe marble stones?
Vertue dyes not, her tombe we neede not raise,
Let them trust tombs which have outliv'd their praise.”[18]

14> These lines adopt a rhetorical strategy that Scodel associates with the humanist tradition: the virtuous deceased need no lavish tomb, as their honour and fame have already been achieved through their deeds.[19] In this way Hatton’s tomb manifests an attempt to make up for deficiencies in the life, while Sidney and Walsingham are appropriately entombed in surviving loyal hearts. However, the poetic lines that find no tomb to mark are still necessary to explain the absence. While this was a rare case where authorship was claimed in print, these lines, like many parodic epitaphs, enjoyed wide circulation, including changes, additions and even translations. A contemporary reference suggests that the lines had actually been placed upon this “most sumptuous Monument” by “a merry poet”.[20] This practice of actually placing the lines on the tomb, however temporarily, was frequent: it happened with those on Archbishop Whitgift,[21] and with the tomb of the epigrammatist John Owen in 1623.

15> Similar to the Hatton epitaphs are those prompted by the death of Thomas Washington, a page to Prince Charles on the much-maligned 1623 voyage to Spain; he was apparently denied a tomb there, which provided an opportunity for comment on the politics of the Spanish Match in the form of a widely-circulated elegy, which in many manuscripts concludes with an imagined epitaph, beginning “Knew’st thou whose these ashes were”.[22] It opens with a familiar trope from elegies on those who die young: they were ripe in maturity or virtue, but not in years. However, the poem takes an abrupt political turn in the fourth couplet as it turns to the conventional consideration of the cause of death: “Inquire not his disease, or payne:/He dyed of nothing but of Spayne.”[23] The death is supernatural in that it is caused by political circumstances rather than any illness. The lines following offer another role for this epitaph: it circulates and acknowledges Washington’s death in a way that no literal epitaph is allowed to do:

“Where hee is not allow’d to have
(Unlesse by stealth) a quiet grave
Hee needs no Epitaph, nor stone
But this: Here lyes lord Washington.”

16> Here the content of a potential epitaph is less important than there be at least some epitaph, however brief. The political circumstances of Prince Charles and Buckingham’s situation in Spain had brought about a situation where an Englishman of good birth was not even provided the bare essentials of a tomb and simple epitaph marker. The poem then offers an imagined one in its place, written with tears upon the dust of Washington’s own body, which will be reinscribed by tears of subsequent mourners. Those readers would be mourning the general folly of the Spanish Match as well as the death of the young Washington.

17> John Felton, the killer of Buckingham in 1628, is another whose unburied body was commemorated by many, most successfully in these widely circulating epitaphic lines:

“heere uninterr’d suspends (though not to save
Surviving frends th’expenses of A grave)
Feltons dead earth wch to the world must bee
Its owne sadd monument, his Elegie
As large as Fame, but whether badd or good
I say not; by him selfe ‘twas writt in blood:
ffor wth his bodie is intomb’d in ayre
Arch’t ore with Heaven, sett with A thousand faire
And glorious Diamond starres. A Sepulchre
that Tyme cann never Ruinate, and where
Th’impartiall worme (wch is not brib’d to spare
Princes corrupt in Marble) cannot share
his Flesh, wch oft the Charitable skyes
Embalme with teares: doeing those obsequies
Belonge to men shall rest, till pittying fowle
Contend to beare his Bodie to his Soule.”[24]

18> This is among the more clever of parodic epitaphs, playing with the reality that here there is no tomb for the lines to mark.[25] They themselves float in the air, passed by word of mouth and manuscript, a fitting marker of the unburied Felton, who was left to hang in chains.[26]

19> The poet holds back from affirming this as either a “good or bad” elegy, but he directs the reader to the “elegy” that Felton wrote himself: the slaying of Buckingham. This pointing to an act or accomplishment on the part of the deceased as the ultimate epitaph is itself a conventional rhetorical step in the epitaph tradition.[27] (It is of course an extension of the inability trope.) Here the gesture enables the poet to evade ultimate responsibility for his affirmation of the act: it speaks for itself. The lines that follow recreate a funerary scene, but here the usual marble and candles are replaced by the natural elements, becoming in this way a divine affirmation of Felton’s act. This “sepulchre” unlike marble and “gilded monuments” will be eternal, achieving that which many epitaphs strove to establish for their subjects. The final reality of vermiculation, suffered even by “Princes in marble” (a warning to King Charles?) is also avoided by this “heavenly burial”.

IV

20> As might be expected, straightforward satiric epitaphs prompted a backlash, particularly from the friends of the deceased. Richard Johnson’s commemoration of Cecil’s death responds to the specific outpouring of satiric epitaphs; rather than memorials; he sees that poetry “carelessly gives way to envy (that canker-worme to greatnesse) to eate out all remembrance of mortallitie[.]”[28] However, in some cases the response to satiric epitaphs took the form of counter-epitaphs. In Cecil’s defence, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, wrote an epitaph that survives in a number of manuscripts. It draws on standard features of the epitaph tradition, beginning with its direct (if awkward) addressing of those who pass by the tomb: “You that reade passing by/Robert, Earle of Salisburye:”, and concludes with the common consolation that while the tomb holds his corpse, heaven has his soul. Here, however, Pembroke adds a detail to the usual rhetoric: “Heaven and friends preserve the rest.” [my italics]. This points to the role of Pembroke in defending Cecil against the “dogs” that had “snarled” after his death.[29] In such exchanges we see survivors struggling to control the legacy of the deceased. None might triumph by being physically inscribed on the tomb, but they vied to be pre-eminent in circulation and memory: to be become known as the epitaph.

21> In the letter regarding the Cecil epitaphs, John Donne goes on to challenge the function of such verses:

“there may be cases where one may do his country good service by libelling against a live man; for where a man is either too great, or his vices too general to be brought under a judiciary accusation, there is no way but this extraordinary accusing, which we call libelling, and I have heard that nothing hath soupled and allayed the Duke of Lerma in his violent greatness so much as the often libels made upon him. But after death it is in all cases unexcusable.”

22> Donne finds such parodic epitaphs empty of satiric purpose, but overlooks how they (like the displayed corpse of Felton) might function as a warning to the living to change their ways to avoid a similar legacy.[30] Francis Osborne, in recording the “Hobbinol” epitaph on Cecil, noted that they “came from so smart a Pen in the Kings sense, that he said, he hoped the Author would die before him: who it was God knows.”[31]

23> Such a purpose is recognized by Richard Brathwaite, whose Remains after Death (1619) offers an extensive discussion of the epitaph genre. He too attacks those who engage in satiric epitaphs:

“Epitaphs of this sort we have too frequent, being forged out of the braine of unseasoned Satyrists, that without distinction bend their wits to asperse imputation upon the deserved memorie of the dead: men of basest nature, defaming such [E4v] whose silence gives them freer scope and priviledge of detraction[.]”[32]

24> Brathwaite suggests their cowardly nature, in that they are attacking the silently defenceless. However, he then acknowledges his earlier suggestion that epitaphs could depict vices as well as virtues; however,

“these Descriptions are to bee shadowed and suited with modest allusions, equally disposed Allegories as their vices, though in part discovered, yet that discovery so intangled as may minister matter of observation to the judicious, and leave the ignorant in a continuall suspense.” [sig. E5r]

25> This is a fascinating argument for a sophisticated approach to parodic epitaphs, suggesting a possible double audience. Ultimately, Brathwaite does include a selection of such “prophane epitaphs” in his collection, those he suggests “modestly discover vice in her nativest colors”.[33] Seemingly, his objection was to those crude libellous epitaphs that lack subtlety in their method, and discernment in their targets. However, any writer of epitaphs ought to proceed carefully, as he could never to expect to have the last word: Robert Gomersall warned that they should experience:

“The same Rigor, that they shew
That 'tis not generous, nor scarcely safe
To make a Libell, for an Epitaph.”[34]

_____

Notes

[1] (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991).

[2] “Parodic epitaph” is my own term for this subgenre; I have found the following contemporary terms used: Richard Brathwaite, in his great collection Remains after Death (1619) calls them “prophane epitaphs” (sig. E4r.), and John Taylor the water-poet playfully refers to them as “epi-knaves” (I Marry Sir, heere is newes indeed, [1623?], (1642), p. 5.

[3] Most literary epitaphs (as distinct from inscribed ones) might be construed as parodies; however, the majority of these lack only inscription: they fully adopt the tone, style and matter of those on tombs.

[4] Bellany, “A Poem on the Archbishop’s Hearse: Puritanism, Libel and Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference,” Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), pp. 137-64; Croft, ‘The reputation of Robert Cecil: libels, political opinion and popular awareness in the early seventeenth century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 1 (1991), pp. 43–69.

[5] Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 45.

[6] Rose, p. 52.

[7] I omit from this abbreviated study another variety of mock epitaph: that which jestingly plays on the name or occupation of a not necessarily significant figure. That on the bellows-maker was particularly famous.

[8] Cecil was buried relatively quietly in St. Etheldreda’s Church, Hatfield; the fine tomb by Maximilien Colt still survives, but I have not yet been able to learn what epitaph (if any) is upon it. See Erna Auerbach and C. Kingsley Adams, Paintings and Sculpture at Hatfield House, (London: Constable, 1971), pp. 111-12.

[9] John Donne wrote “Nothing in my Lord Salisbury’s death exercised my poor consideration so much as the multitude of libels.” (Life and Letters, ed. Edmund Gosse, 2 vols., (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), vol. 1, p. 312.) Similarly, the Earl of Dorset wrote, “More ill-spoken of and in more several kinds, than I think ever anyone was”. (Stowe MS, 172/319, 22 June 1612, qtd. in Algernon Cecil, A Life of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1915), p. 343.

[10] Life and Letters, vol. 1, p. 313.

[11] “Early Stuart Libels” reproduces BL MS Egerton 2230, fol. 34r, and offers a list of many of the places where this poem is found.

[12] Camb. MS Add. 57, fol. 95r.

[13] Traditional Memorials of King James, in The Works of Francis Osborne, 8th ed. (1682), 537.

[14] Bodl. MS Malone 23, p. 143.

[15] Osborne, 536-7; Osborne wryly notes that he was “called to answer at a higher Tribunal”. Variant copies are found in Bodl. Don.d.58, fol. 18r; Hunt. 116, p. 25; BL.Add.10309, fol. 153r; Rosenbach 187, p. 114; Bodl.Ashmole 781, fol. 136r; Folger V.a.345, p. 33; Folger V.a.262, p. 154.

[16] Bodl. Malone 23, pp. 5-6. It also appears in Folger V.a.345, p. 260; Rosenbach 187, p. 99; Huntington 116, p. 174 (in both Rosenbach and Huntington the figure is identified as “Lady Wake”); Camb. Add. 9221, fol. 109v; Camb. Add. MS 4138, fol. 47v. Lake did not die until 1630; on the public mockery of her ca. 1619, see Bellany in Oxford DNB.

[17] Camb. Add. MS 9221, fol. 109v.

[18] Chrestoleros, (1598), 4:31.

[19] pp. 17-49.

[20] John Stow, A Survey of London: Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), p. 338. the herald Augustine Vincent records both a two and eight-line version, and then a Latin translation. (College of Arms, MS 218, p. 249.) In this manuscript someone has very carefully completely x-ed out the lemma. A similar suppression is found in a copy in Camb. MS. Add. 9221, fol. 99r, where the second line reads: “for great xxair [sic] hath all the roome”.

[21] See Bellany.

[22] See, for example, Bodl. MS Rawl.Poet. 26, fol. 76v.

[23] Folger V.a.262. It also appears in Huntington 198, vol. 1, p. 22; BL.Add. 25303, fol. 136r; Rosenbach 188, p. 192; Folger V.a.345, p. 102; BL Add. 15227, fol. 10v; Bodl. Rawl. 26, fol. 76v.

[24] Malone MS 23, fol. 210v. Manifold manuscript copies of the poem survive; see the version and accompanying discussion in “Early Stuart Libels”. The final couplet is problematic; I have chosen the Malone version as it shows the work of the copyist in attempting to make sense of the lines. In that manuscript, they are originally written, “Belonge to men shall last, and pittying fowle/Contend to beare his Bodie to his Soule”, which is commonly found in other manuscripts, but has then been amended as it reads above. For discussion of the potential authorship of the poem, see Holstun, Ehud's dagger: class struggle in the English Revolution, (London; New York: Verso, 2000), p. 184.

[25] A thorough and perceptive reading of the poem is offered in Holstun, pp. 184-6, but treated more as an elegy than a parodic epitaph on a non-existent tomb.

[26] Oxford DNB.

[27] Famous examples would include that on Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s, “Lector, Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice”. The conceit goes back at Cato, who would have no shrine or monument “supposing his vertues to be sufficient annals and records to eternise his name” (Brathwaite, Remains after Death, (1619), sig. D1r).

[28] A remembrance of the honors due to the life and death of Robert Earle of Salisbury, (1612), sig. A2r.

[29] Dr. Farmer Chetham Manuscript, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, (Manchester, 1873), p. 188.

[30] This is an argument widespread in the satiric tradition: that a satiric attack on an individual was not likely to change that figure’s behaviour, but might correct others out of fear of a similar public ridiculing.

[31] Works, (1673), p. 514.

[32] sig. E4r-v.

[33] sig. E5v.

[34] Robert Gomersall, “To his [Mr. John Deane of New College] Detractors.” Poems, (1633), p. 9.
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James Doelman is an Associate Professor of English at Brescia University College, University of Western Ontario. He is engaged in a study of epigrams and epitaphs in the period 1590-1640, from which recent articles have appeared in The Huntington Library Quarterly, and Christianity and Literature.

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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures

Daniel Fusch: "The Unmiraculous Miracle"

Daniel Fusch
Editor, Dante’s Heart
Director of Research, Academic Impressions

The Discourse of the Unmiraculous Miracle: Touching for the King’s Evil in Stuart England

1> Almost immediately upon his coronation, James I revived the ritual of “touching” to cure scrofula, or the King’s Evil, a healing rite that James’ predecessor had used only sparingly during her reign. In this rite, the monarch touches a coin to a diseased subject’s eyes or forehead, or lays hands on the subject and then hangs a coin about the subject’s neck like a pendant. The subject is then presumed to be marvelously cured, and retains the coin as a sign of the cure. In England the ritual dated back almost to the time of the Norman Conquest, but had fallen into some disuse after the Reformation. However, James performed this ceremony frequently—frequently enough, in fact, to draw comment from Shakespeare in Macbeth 4.3.

2> This paper will consider Shakespeare’s ambivalence concerning the ritual in that passage within the context of contemporaneous cultural discourses—including medical texts, monarchic edicts, and public prayer. In doing so, this paper will challenge the prevailing critical assumption that the Stuart monarchy continued the rite of touching with great hesitancy, arguing instead that James I reinstated and promoted the rite actively. By applying public prayer as both the primary form of discourse in which to present his views on the ritual and the form in which to enact the rite, James was able to strip from the ritual any explicit claim of a miraculous occurrence, while at the same time asserting the efficacy of the miracle. James implicitly defended the ethical benefit of the ceremony while revising the form and public definition of the ritual for an early modern and skeptical audience.

3> First, consider the concerns of James’ contemporaries that made such a revision necessary. Shakespeare’s description of the rite distills much of the contemporary debate over both the ethical import and efficacy of the ceremony. In Macbeth 4.3, Macduff, visiting England, hears of the ritual and then asks Malcolm to explain it:

"Doct. Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched souls
That stay his cure. Their malady convinces
The great assay of art; but at his touch,
Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand,
That presently amend.

Mal. I thank you, doctor. Exit [Doctor].

Macd. What’s the disease he means?

Mal. ‘Tis call’d the evil:
A most miraculous work in this good King,
Which often, since my here-remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits Heaven,
Himself best knows; but strangely-visited people,
All swoll’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures;
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers, and ‘tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction. With this strange virtue,
He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy,
And sundry blessings hang about his throne
That speak him full of grace."[i]

4> On the one hand, Shakespeare’s description of the rite is lavish in its praise of the monarch and in its affirmation that the ritual is a sacred and holy matter, “a healing benediction” and one of various “heavenly gifts” that the king has brought to his realm. Yet, as Deborah Willis notes in her study of the “touching” rite, Malcolm’s explanation “registers even the moments of uneasiness” about the ritual, such as the uncertainty as to what agency (monarchical, divine, or diabolical) provides the cure.[ii] The unease in the scene is a counter-reaction to the Doctor’s unequivocal statement, “Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand.” After the Doctor’s exit, Malcolm betrays his unease with this unqualified interpretation of the rite when he comments, “How he solicits Heaven, / Himself best knows.” The remark both raises and dismisses that anxiety.

5> James himself was careful to avoid any mention of the “touching” rite being either magical or marvelous, though Shakespeare or others of his subjects were free to decide that it was “a most miraculous work.” James even had the traditional touchpieces altered, so that the coins’ inscription, formerly A Domino factum est istud et est mirabile (“This is done by God and it is marvelous”), was shortened to A Domino factum est istud (“This is done by God”), an inscription which remained in use for the rest of the century.[iii] The new inscription, like the old, attributes the healing to divine power, so that the king is merely the ceremonial vessel or vehicle for that power and not its source, but the new inscription places no emphasis on the marvelous nature of the cure. The word “mirabile,” and with it any verbal suggestion of wonder or ritual magic, has been excised from the language of the ritual. We could also recall James’ public and often-quoted insistence, at his first observance of the rite, that “neither he nor any other King can in truth have the power to heal the disease called the Evil, the age of miracles being past.”[iv] At this occasion James must have realized that the divided factions of England were watching his ritual intently and with urgent concerns as to what his rhetoric would imply for the church and the spiritual health of his people.

6> In reference to such monarchic statements, Deborah Willis remarks that “James’ qualms are well documented”[v]; similarly, Crawfurd concludes that James was “anxious to discontinue the practice of touching, expressing disbelief,” and that he was reluctant to support that “superstition.”[vi] Marc Bloch, in his study The Royal Touch, even goes so far as to claim that James’ succession “came near to dealing it [the touching rite] a mortal blow.”[vii] These critics point to the evidence of James’ spoken skepticism about the miraculous nature of the rite, as well as the monarch’s removal of et est mirabile from the coins. Crawfurd also notes that the written Service of Healing as used by James I “contains no instruction at all as to the actual touching of the sore place, so that the abandoning of this detail of the ritual may presumably referred to James.”[viii] Crawfurd also quotes Heylyn’s 1659 Animadversions of Fuller’s Church History to the effect that James may have replaced the traditional gesture of the physical touching of the diseased with “gently drawing both his hands over the sore at the reading of the first Gospel.” [ix] Yet later in his argument Crawfurd ascribes the possible omission of the physical touch not to James’ religious aversion for the miracle but instead to his personal aversion for physical contact with “the outward manifestations of disease.”[x]

7> I contend that James’ public “qualms” do not reflect the reality of his policy concerning ritual, and that his replacement of a traditionally Catholic gesture (i.e., touching the supplicant’s brow, or perhaps making the Sign of the Cross over the sore) with a Protestant one (i.e., the gentle drawing of the hands over the sore after a scriptural reading) within the ceremony does not indicate a distaste for the ritual itself. Consider that the performance of this ritual was one of James’ first royal actions in England. Far from doing away with the ceremony, with this rite James initiated an extensive program of reviving and preserving ceremonies while simultaneously divesting them of the language of magic and wonder (The Book of Sports was a later part of this same program). James attempted to perform visible miracles while insisting that nothing miraculous was occurring.

8> Though James’ insistence that the age of miracles was past appears to indicate a more skeptical attitude toward ritual wonder, one might note several pieces of evidence to the contrary. For one, James I was the first English monarch to have touchpieces minted purely for the purpose of ritual healing, separate from the angels minted as coin of the realm. As Crawfurd himself notes:

"A document in the Public Record Office, dated April 10, 1611, is a warrant to the Treasurer and Under Treasurer of the Exchequer, and shows that ‘healing Angels’ were specially minted to his order. A similar warrant, dated Sept. 16, 1624, commands the provision of fine gold for the making."[xi]

9> James’ order for touchpieces that have no purpose other than a ritual one indicates a desire to emphasize the sanctity of the rite. The new coins did not function as currency, but only as ritual and marvelous artifacts—“as a talisman possessing its own intrinsic medicinal power.”[xii] By the end of James’ reign, there was even a thriving black market in which these angels were assigned value not as currency but as holy relics, or even as cures themselves:

". . . there was a considerable trade in these talismans. Sick people who were unable, for one reason or another, to visit the court in person, or were perhaps frightened by the expense of the journey, used to buy these coins, with the idea of thus acquiring—no doubt at a reduced cost—some share in the miraculous benefits distributed by the sacred hand of the sovereign."[xiii]

10> The existence of such a market indicates a popular faith in the sanctity of the ritual and its efficacy for healing; the angels were widely sought and even purchased, and the ceremonies themselves were well attended under both James I and Charles I. There were also a number of popular stories about relapses after disposal of the coins.[xiv]

11> A further evidence that James (and his successor) had no desire of discontinuing this ritual is the frequency with which he observed it. In fact, specific times of the year were prescribed for the ceremony; later, under Charles I, James’ successor, there were even specific days reserved, so that “fixed times were prescribed for healing, fourteen days before and after Easter and Michaelmas respectively.”[xv] The establishing of ceremonial times indicates that despite stated anxieties James and his successor found the ritual not only appealing but necessary, and that so many supplicants were arriving at the court on a regular basis that it became necessary to set specific times for the observance of the ritual, to have any order. The fact that Charles I issued repeated proclamations—in 1626, 1628, 1629, 1630, 1631, 1634, and 1635[xvi]—to insist on the observance of these dates, and not others, also attests the enduring appeal of the ritual to the populace, who kept arriving at court regardless of the appointed dates.

12> After his initial revival of the rite in 1603, James continued the ritual for curing the king’s evil in the face of growing skepticism. This skepticism took several forms. Notably, there were those who doubted that the healing took place at all, and thought it a scam, a ceremony designed to delude the people, rather on a level with the Catholic Church’s invention of purgatory; Bloch cites a case of public skepticism in England as early as 1547, voiced by one Nicholas Ridley, which prompted an immediate rebuke from a bishop, who insisted that the healing was “a gift from God.”[xvii] Later, Elizabeth’s chaplain published a book that denounced “touching” as a “popular superstition.”[xviii] By James’ time, Willis notes that there were at least three disparate views of the ritual, what she calls “a promiscuous mix of beliefs” (though “troubled” might be a better word here than “promiscuous”). First, touching might be a secular miracle, in which the healing is “the product of a supernatural power inhering in the king’s person”; second, it might be a religious rite, in which the monarch serves as intercessor between the afflicted and God; or third, it might be mere spectacle, as one of James’ own contemporaries insisted, calling the rite “a device to aggrandize the virtue of kings when miracles were in fashion.”[xix] This discordant variety of opinion shows the anxiety that the ritual could provoke. From popular “miracle” tracts to medical treatises, contemporary literature on the touching wrestled with the possible definitions of the ritual. For example, William Clowes’ Right fruitful and approved treatise, for the artificial cure of that malady called in Latin Struma, and in English, the evil (1602) acknowledges that this “disease repugnant to nature” is cured by the monarch’s “sacred hands,” yet insists on a study of what he calls “artificial” (rather than divine) gifts, medicinal and magical cures handed down by the ancients.[xx] Clowes manages to evade concerns that such a chirurgical study may be inappropriate for a Protestant scholar by remarking, as doctors even in the seventeenth century frequently did (one might compare Sir Thomas Browne’s tolerance of the ceremonies of disparate spiritual traditions, in Religio Medici[xxi]), “if I find…anything that may be to the good of the patients, and better increase of my knowledge & skill in the art of chirurgery, be it either in Galen or Paracelsus; yea, Turk, Jew, or any other infidel: I will not refuse it, but be thankful to God for the same” (Clowes, EEBO, image 3).[xxii] James I, in a more public position, could not take such a cavalier attitude toward the anxieties of his audience.

13> Deborah Willis interprets the ritual, via Greenblatt, as a “Protestant ‘evacuation’ of a medieval belief, in which the magical content of the belief is emptied out, while its form is made available for a new, metaphorical use.”[xxiii] However, when we review the actual changes to the rite, we find the opposite: that the magic and the belief in a miraculous transformation remained, while the form and rhetoric of the rite changed. For James, it was all right to do the magic, so long as he called it something else. By remarkable fortune, we have a description of James’ public prayer at his first observance of the ritual, which makes this point clear. The description is in a letter dated October 8, 1603, discovered in the Archives of the Vatican by Crawfurd. This letter to the holy See is primarily concerned with judging James’ religious affiliations and his treatment of the various religious factions in England. In reference to the touching rite, the letter reports:

". . . when some of these patients were presented to him in his ante-chamber, he first had a prayer offered by a Calvinist minister, and then remarked that he was puzzled as to how to act. From one point of view he did not see how the patient could be cured without a miracle, and nowadays miracles had ceased and no longer happened: so he was afraid of committing a superstitious act. From another point of view, however, inasmuch as it was an ancient usage and for the good of his subjects, he resolved to give it a trial, but only by way of prayer, in which he begged all present to join him, and then he touched the sick folk."[xxiv]

14> James was probably “puzzled” in fact, not merely in show: he had recently been presented with the Millenary Petition by the more radical reformers, and the bishops were at his side insisting that he drive those reformers out of England. The letter to the Vatican shows James caught between opposing viewpoints and making a public show of reluctance, a type of momentary hedging of bets that would later be belied by his frequent observance of the ritual and by his proclamations—such as the Book of Sports—in support of other ceremonies that had been declared superstitious by factions in the Church.

15> At the first performance of the touching rite, James had to decide what to do with a complex issue, apparently at the spur of the moment. James acknowledges and even sympathizes with the anxieties about the rite; additionally, he voices the concern that the ritual may not actually work. Because the age of miracles is past, the ritual may not actually achieve a healing or reformation of the sick; the matter must be put to trial. However, once the prayer has been offered and the subject has been “touched,” the ritual is presumed to have in fact cured the subject, and therefore the observance of the ritual does enact a miracle, putting the lie to James’ statement that the age of miracles is past. In fact, each time that he performs this rite, a miracle officially takes place. The one stipulation is that it not be called a miracle (thus, et est mirabile must be stricken from the coins).

16> Despite his stated concerns, then, James defends the ceremony by declaring it to be “for the good of his subjects” (a comment which echoes his stance on ritual in Basilokon Doron[xxv]), and he refashions the form of the medieval ceremony for a contemporary, Protestant audience. For this audience, the marvel will be achieved “only by way of prayer.” By including everyone present in that prayer—“he begged all present to join him”—James calls them all, courtiers, representatives of the Church, and suppliants alike, to be participants in the ceremony. He implicates them in both the perils and the possibilities of the ritual, and then unites them in their observance of the ritual and in their experience of the magical healing. The prayer prepares them for a wonder and attempts to disarm their anxieties.

17> For all these reasons, James probably had fewer qualms about reinstating the ritual than has been suggested, though he maintained a rhetoric of skepticism in order to conciliate the prevailing religious anxieties about the ceremony. For James, the rite must have affirmed the sanctity of the monarch and of his relationship to the nation, and promoted the health of the realm in two senses: 1) it was meant to cure a physical ailment and a disfigurement that was widespread in England (i.e., scrofula); 2) it was meant to cure spiritual divisions, which are the spiritual disfigurements of church and nation – and James attempted such a cure by inviting and including dissenters in the ritual via the opening prayer. This position—that ritual offers occasion for spiritual health and the fashioning of unity for the realm—would become a central and controversial tenet in James’ asystematic but vigorous royal policy.
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Notes

[i] Shakespeare, William. “Macbeth.” The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Eds. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. 4.3.141-59.

[ii] Willis, Deborah. “The Monarch and the Sacred: Shakespeare and the Ceremony for the Healing of the King’s Evil.” True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry, eds. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 147-168. 158.

[iii] Crawfurd, Raymond. The King’s Evil. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. 88.

[iv] qtd. in Willis, 149.

[v] Willis, 167. Note 5.

[vi] Crawfurd, 82.

[vii] Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England. J. E. Anderson, trans. 1961. New York: Dorset Press, 1989. 191.

[viii] Crawfurd, 87.

[ix] Ibid., 88.

[x] Ibid, 87.

[xi] Ibid, 89.

[xii] Bloch, 182.

[xiii] Ibid., 183.

[xiv] Ibid., 183.

[xv] Crawfurd, 89-90, 93.

[xvi] Charles I. “By the King. A proclamation for the better direction of those who desire to repaire to the court, for the cure of their disease, called, the Kings euill.” Imprinted by Robert Barker, printer to the king, in 1626, 1628, 1629, 1630, 1631, 1634, and 1635. EEBO, British Library, STC (2nd ed.) / 8829; STC (2nd ed.) / 8895; STC (2nd ed.) / 8928; STC (2nd ed.) / 8942; STC (2nd ed.) / 8973; STC (2nd ed.) / 9013; STC (2nd ed.) / 9040.

[xvii] Bloch, 189.

[xviii] Ibid., 182.

[xix] qtd. in Willis, 150.

[xx] Clowes, William. “A right frutefull and approoued treatise, for the artificiall cure of that malady called in Latin Struma, and in English, the evill . . . .” EEBO, British Library, 879:12.

[xxi] Browne, Sir Thomas. “Religio Medici.” Religio Medici, Hydrotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus. Robin Robbins, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 18-34.

[xxii] Clowes, EEBO, image 3.

[xxiii] Willis, 151.

[xxiv] qtd. in Crawfurd, 83.

[xxv] James I. “Basilokon Doron.” James I: The Works. A Series of Reprints Selected by Bernard Fabian, Edgar Mertner, Karl Schneider, and Marvin Spevack. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures

Katherine Heavey: "Translating Medea"

Katherine Heavey
Durham University

Translating Medea into the Sixteenth Century

[ . . . ] I quite my Fathers love with mortall spite, I playde the whore, the murdresse and the théefe. (Robinson, The Reward of Wickedness)

1> Writing The Reward of Wickedness, published in 1574, Richard Robinson puts these regretful, self-abasing words into the mouth of Medea, languishing in Hell. Such a portrayal of Medea obviously contrasts markedly with the Greek and Latin renderings of Euripides, Ovid and Seneca, which were known by the sixteenth century, and which all portray Medea exulting in her capacity for violence. This divergence from classical tradition was possible since, unlike many of their medieval predecessors, Renaissance authors did not see Medea’s story as historical fact, but rather as literature. This distinction meant that, while they felt free to play up the violent and supernatural excesses of her story, at the same time they felt able to manipulate it to didactic effect.

2> However, this very compulsion to alter suggests the difficulties she posed to the period. Medea’s murderous and magical agency is intensely problematic to male authors, and many follow Robinson’s example, undermining her power in a variety of ways. Indeed, despite the truth of Robin Sowerby’s observation that “It has always been an attraction of pagan myth that it facilitates a freedom of imaginative play uninhibited by the Christian moral censor” (290), this concern with representing Medea’s crimes but also suggesting their consequences is a hallmark of Renaissance renderings of her story. At the same time, the lengths these authors go to paradoxically draw attention to the troubling extent of Medea’s influence, the ways her threat is rooted in her femininity and her refusal to conform to (male) societal pressures.

3> Indeed, although direct translation of classical texts was also popular in the Renaissance, even here, Medea poses difficulties. Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a highly influential example of the importance the Renaissance period attached to translation. As Jonathan Bate puts it, “If Shakespeare and his contemporaries owed their intimacy with Ovidian rhetoric to the grammar schools, their easy familiarity with Ovidian narrative was as much due to Golding” (29). George Turberville’s Heroides, also published in 1567, were similarly popular—as Frederick Boas notes, they “went through five editions between 1567 and 1600” (xv-xvi). For the most part, Golding and Turberville translate Ovid faithfully, making few noticeable changes to their Latin sources, besides some effort to explain references for their readers. Some alterations, however, are more interesting. Thus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the reader is told that Medea was impressed by Jason when he came to plead with her, since et casu solito formosior Aesone natus / illa luce fuit: posses ignoscere amanti (7.84-5) (“It chanced that the son of Aeson was more beautiful than usual that day: you could pardon her for loving him”). In Golding’s rendering, this assessment is far more obviously Medea’s, and thus subjective: “farre more faire and beautifull of face / She thought him then than ever erst: but sure it doth behove / Hir judgement should be borne withal because she was in love” (7.120-2). Here, of course, the suggestion that Medea may have been wrong, and may have been swayed by the strength of her feelings, compromises her judgement and correspondingly her power. Turberville also chooses to emphasise the possibility of Medea’s personal suffering. In her letter to Jason, his Hypsipyle hopes of Medea

"When sea and land she hath
Consumde, up to the skye,
Let her goe range like a Rogue
and by selfe slaughter die." (6.80)

4> Ovid’s Heroides has no reference to suicide, and instead Hypsipyle wishes cum mare, cum terras consumpserit, aera temptet; / erret inops, exspes, caede cruenta sua! (6.161-2) (“When she shall have no hope more of refuge by the sea or by the land, let her make trial of the air; let her wander, destitute, bereft of hope, stained red with the blood of her murders!”) Here, Turberville may make the addition in an effort to pass a firmer judgement on Medea, to portray her as subject to some kind of higher power, even if it is only that of her own conscience. This insistence on Medea’s punishment may be explicitly linked to her gender. Deborah Greenhut finds that “Turberville’s translation of the Heroides affirms a longstanding, misogynist tradition” (190), and indeed, to the male literary establishment engaged in translating classical figures, the gender of characters such as Medea and Procne may be the most threatening thing about them, representative as it is of difference on such a fundamental scale. However, Turberville’s own views on women notwithstanding, such a flagrant deviation from his source text (particularly in the context of what Kathleen Tillotson and Bernard H. Newdigate have termed a “pedestrian translation” of Ovid), becomes highly significant, indicative of the threat Renaissance authors saw in Medea, and their desire to contain this threat by somehow suggesting punishment for her behaviour.

5> In the Preface to his 1566 translation of Seneca’s Medea, John Studley highlights the changes he has made, admitting he has “changed the fyrste Chorus, because in it I sawe nothing but an heape of prophane storyes, and names of prophane Idoles” (125-6). As this would suggest, the liberties he takes with the text are clear from the beginning, and are often intended to paint his Renaissance Medea as less threatening, more socially acceptable, than her classical counterpart. The Latin chorus Studley cuts out congratulates Jason for having escaped the wild Medea, and emphasises her unpredictability and dangerous otherness. Studley’s new chorus rather pities Medea for her credulous love, observing

"The shafte that flew from Cupids golden bowe,
With fethers so hath dymed her daseld eyes,
That can not see to shun the waye of woe." (361-3)

6> The accounts of Euripides and Seneca, relying as they do on Medea’s version of events, make it unclear whether Jason ever really loved her. Studley has drawn his own conclusions, and his Jason is characterised as a flattering seducer. The playwright notes

"Yet was hys speache so pleased and so milde,
thys tongue so fylde, hys promyses so fayre,
sweete was the fowlers songe that hath beguylde
The selye byrde, brought to the lymed snare." (369-72)

7> This sense of Studley negotiating Medea’s power, making her appear more helpless in an attempt to neutralise her threat, can be seen too in his treatment of Jason’s final lines in the play. Instead of the Senecan representation of Medea as above and beyond human experience, unable to receive the gods’ assistance but also not subject to their will, that is contained in his declaration testare nullos esse, qua veheris, deos (1027) (“bear witness that wherever you go there are no gods”), Studley’s Jason exclaims “Bear wytnesse grace of God is none / In place of thy repayre” (2889-90). Here, Jason appears to be exercising a moral judgement on Medea, one that still acknowledges God’s power but that concurrently excludes her from its benefits, making her seem a less powerful character, who must seek a place of “repayre” rather than going wherever she pleases. As Robert S. Miola puts it:

"Seneca’s Medea continues on as living testimony to the disorder of the world, as an embodiment of an evil so potent as to nullify divine power and presence; Studley’s Medea is simply a spectacular sinner, one who infects her surroundings and lives without God’s grace." (105)

8> It is clear that these translations all betray a desire to limit the autonomy and agency they find so alarming in Medea, either by making her more personally vulnerable, or by suggesting some higher power or future punishment that will see her held to account. This impulse, to subject Medea to the societal strictures of the sixteenth century, can be seen equally clearly in new works that take advantage of Medea’s story. Both The Rocke of Regard, by George Whetstone, and The Reward of Wickedness, by Richard Robinson, follow Studley in that they portray Medea as a suffering character. In both works she is utterly alone, enjoying none of the ability to escape society and its censures that is so famously displayed by her Senecan and Euripidean counterparts.

9> In his 1576 poem, Whetstone represents Medea as regretting the help she gave Jason and the sacrifices she made. Indeed, she highlights her power specifically to illustrate how she is, paradoxically, unable to help herself:

"What vaileth now my skil, or sight in Magiches lore, / May charmed hearbs, suffice to help, or cure my festred sore, / A salve I shapt, for others smart, / My selfe to ayde, I want the Arte."

10> She outlines her powers in utterly familiar Ovidian language: “I made the wayward Moone, against the Sunne to strive, / And gastly ghostes, from burial graves, ful oft I did revive”. However, unlike her Senecan or Ovidian counterparts, Whetstone’s Medea does not see herself as set apart from other women because of these powers—rather she sees her story as a cautionary tale, warning

"But lordly lookes full oft, and slippry seruice eke, / To harmelesse Ladies have béene vowde, to catch ye suters séeke. / And then depart, from plighted othe, / Their sugred woordes, yéelde sealdome trothe."

11> The typical image, seen in the Metamorphoses, of Medea as Jason’s second (and perhaps secondary) prize, his spolia altera (7.157), is present: “The goulden fléece, thou wert to blame, / To beare away, I wonne the same”. She portrays herself as a victim, forsaken by Jason and with no Euripidean, Senecan or Ovidian ability to transcend her unfavourable circumstances, which must instead be endured. Here, then, Whetstone portrays Medea as a hapless woman, who may acknowledge her power only to stress how it is passed, or inadequate in the face of male deception, or can only be bent to the service of others.

12> In The Reward of Wickedness, published in 1574, Medea is used in a similarly didactic fashion. Since he aims to provide a cautionary example against female wickedness, Robinson is predictably keen to represent, rather than skim over, Medea’s crimes and her transgressive behaviour. However, while in the classical tradition Medea is utterly unrepentant of her children’s murders (though she does sometimes regret the killing of her brother), here she feels keenly the weight of society’s disapproval, and her retelling of her crimes has a very different emphasis. Crucially, she portrays her magical power as less than power of the Christian God, and indeed less than that of the pagan gods she generally feels an affinity for:

"O that witches and Coniurers knew so well as I, / of Joves mightie doome that doth in heaven sitte, / Then woulde they mende, if they had grace or witte, / To serve the Lorde woulde set theyr whole delight."

13> In The bookes verdite vpon Medea, Robinson warns “You witches all take heede, you see how God rewardes: / And what appoynted is your meede, that divelish actes regardes”.

14> However, while this discomfort with witchcraft is predictable, Robinson also sees Medea’s transgression as speaking to more ordinary women, a warning to exercise greater control:

"(Alas) whoe would have thought, that in a womans breast: / Dame nature would have let been wrought, to breede so much unrest: / [ . . . ] You parents it is time, to looke your younglings to: / [ . . . ] Keepe in your daughters strayght, best counsell I can geve: / Least that perhaps shee catch a bayte, that both your harts may greve."

15> Here, the power Medea had, and the threat she once posed the male community and to her own immediate and extended family, are referenced by Robinson only to stress how she has been brought down by God, and now suffers the torments of the damned. As Götz Schmitz puts it, “His is a Protestant Hell, where religious and private misconduct are unpardonable” (61). Writing an earlier account of the poem, Willard Farnham also notes Robinson’s uncompromising attitude to the unhappy sinners he portrays, suggesting “He [ . . . ] serves in his humble way as a sign of the fervor which the conception of tragic justice was beginning to arouse” (306). Accordingly, Medea’s self-abasing grief and her grisly suffering mean that she effectively serves Robinson’s religious and didactic ends, and thus shows a male author once more bending Medea’s story, and her threat, to his own purpose.

16> Speaking of forms of Renaissance imitation (and drawing on Thomas M. Greene’s work as he does so), Bate notes “Most sophisticated is ‘dialectical’ imitation, in which the later text actively conflicts with and dissociates itself from its classical pretext” (42). Like Turberville’s and Studley’s translations, Whetstone’s and Robinson’s original treatments of Medea have been seldom admired, and yet if they are viewed in the light of Bate’s comment they become more useful. Whetstone and Robinson engage with Medea’s story, and imitate to a certain degree. However, like Studley and Turberville, they unashamedly alter what does not suit their purpose. Sixteenth century societal mores meant that all four authors plainly object to the criminal escaping punishment they would have found in Seneca, Euripides or the Metamorphoses, and attempt to impose some kind of sanction or limit on Medea. This concern remains apparent throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the work of writers such as Thomas Heywood or Charles Gildon, who use Medea directly, and others such as Shakespeare or Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. These latter authors construct female characters who very often seem influenced by the figure of the classical Medea. However, Norton and Sackville’s Videna, or Shakespeare’s Tamora or Lady Macbeth, are human characters, crucially (and comfortingly) subject, as the classical Medea is not, to the bounds of a male-dominated society.

17> The classical Medea was a compelling figure for the male literary establishment in the Renaissance—however, as a witch and as a woman, as a pagan and a character with no regard for patriarchal institutions, she remains intensely threatening. Male authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deal with her threat by undermining her autonomy, making her more personally vulnerable, penitent or subject to the consequences of her actions. In doing so, they highlight, intentionally or unintentionally, the frictions and conflicts that the Renaissance Medea engenders—frictions between male and female, society and the ‘other’, and between classical rendering and Renaissance rewriting.

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Works Cited

Primary Texts

Drayton, Michael. Works, Vol 5: Introduction, Notes, Variant Readings. Ed. Kathleen Tillotson and Bernard H. Newdigate. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1941.

Golding, Arthur. Shakespeare’s Ovid: Being Arthur Golding’s Translation of the Metamorphoses. Ed. W.H.D. Rouse. London: Centaur Press, 1961.

Ovid. Heroides and Amores. Trans. G. Showerman. London: Heinemann, 1914.

---. Metamorphoses. Vol I, Books I-VIII. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1917.

Robinson, Richard. The Reward of Wickedness, 1574. Early English Books Online. 1 June 2007. <http://eebo.chadwyck.com/>.

Seneca. Medea. Trans. H. M. Hine. Warminster: Aris and Philips, 2000.

Studley, John. Translations of Seneca’s Agamemnon and Medea. Ed. E. M. Spearing. Louvain: A. Uystpruys, 1913.

Turberville, George. The Heroicall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, Translated into English Verse by George Turberville. Ed. Frederick Boas. London: Cresset Press Ltd, 1928.

Whetstone, George. The Rocke of Regard diuided into foure parts. 1576. Early English Books Online. 1 June 2007. <http://eebo.chadwyck.com/>.

Secondary Texts

Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.

Farnham, Willard. The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1936.

Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale U P, 1982.

Greenhut, Deborah S. Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides. New York: P. Lang, 1988.

Miola, Robert S. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Schmitz, Götz. The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Sowerby, Robin. The Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry. London: Longman, 1994.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures